IndiBlogger – Lets suggest something for you!

When I started this blog, with my first post, I hardly had any visitors. I was thinking of ways to promote this blog (Apart from spamming :)). A google search for Indian Startups Blog at that time mentioned IndiBlogger.in. For readers, new to this site, IndiBlogger is a directory listing of all Indian Blogs. They were mentioned in the press for a few times. They also have search only version (For some Google money?) here. This post is based on their personal request.

As usual I am writing the post in points.

Please upgrade!

Frankly speaking, your site appears like a traditional telephone directory or a classifieds listing where people have to search to find anything. While this might be good for starters like me to get their blogs listed and gain some traffic, what is in it for bloggers who are already established like Arun and Aasish?

My two cents for making your site more useful than it is.

Forget Search

Forget it. Nobody wants to search any more. How about suggest? Lets take my profile page for instance. I have mentioned the tags for my blog. How about suggesting blogs with the same tag in the simplest case? You can also email me when a new blog is getting listed with the simillar tag. And thus make me repeat visits and hence more traffic! I could say Orkut suggesting communities to be a good example for this. Not to mention, we are not expecting something very algorithmic like Orkut’s.

Better Search

How about showing last 3 posts title along with search result? How about some Web 2.0 + AJAX stuff on that?

Automatically populate “My network” tab.

When I login to your site, I can see three tabs under “My network”

My blog’s readers – If I am using wordpress, parse my comments feed url, extract my readers blog address and populate here. Well I understand that this would require significant investment, but I started with “Please upgrade” right. It also means invest!

Blogs I read – Ask for my Google Reader password and store all the blogs I read! Check out Blogbard and see how they are doing this.

Better RSS feed

How about RSS feeds of blogs from my directory? See if you can utilize pipes for this.

Readers, can you think of any other points? Please add it to the comments section.

3 Responses to “IndiBlogger – Lets suggest something for you!”

On suggesting blogs with the same tag, this is a good idea. Sending an email for every new blog with a matching tag – I have my doubts on the relevancy, especially when every second bloggers puts down “life” as a tag!

Showing last 3 posts – that would mean building an aggregator into the site, and it’s something we’re working on. As for the ajax search, we’re also working on an auto-suggest for the search box.

Parsing the comments feed to display the blog’s readers urls – how do we ensure that those urls are of Indian bloggers/not spam? That’s why we’re keeping it from within the directory.

Asking for their google reader password -again, how do we know if those blogs are Indian? If we don’t keep our content India-centric then we dilute our objective.

RSS feeds of your blogs – again, we’ll have this up once our aggregator is in place!

I kinda agree that you cannot continue to keep all content india specific throughout. But I am here to give just suggestions. Implementation is your problem 🙂 But I think I have communicated the idea clearly. Please upgrade!